Category: Hair Diseases

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Survival rates for the disease have risen by almost a third since the 1970s and more than 96 per cent of men who contract the cancer today are now cured. Fewer than 70 per cent of patients survived the disease 40 years ago.

Each year around 2,300 new cases of testicular cancer are diagnosed in the UK. Unlike many other cancers, the disease strikes at a relatively young age. It is the most common cancer in men aged 15 to 49.

The improvement in survival rates is in large part down to the use of the drug cisplatin, a chemotherapy drug also used to treat bladder, lung and ovarian cancers.

Read the rest — Almost all testicular cancer patients now recover

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Soy supplements don’t prevent a recurrence of prostate cancer after surgical removal of the prostate, a new small study finds. Many men with prostate cancer try soy products, but there is no hard evidence that they thwart a return of the disease, the researchers said.

“If one eats soy every day after surgery for prostate cancer, one does not reduce the risk of recurrence,” said the study’s lead researcher, Dr. Maarten Bosland, a professor of pathology at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

“A lot of men think that soy might be beneficial, but this study shows that it’s not,” he said. On the other hand, soy posed no adverse side effects. “It’s safe to take soy, but you won’t benefit from it for your prostate cancer,” Bosland added. All of the men studied had an increased risk of having cancer recur because the surgery — called a radical prostatectomy — hadn’t removed all the cancerous cells, Bosland noted.

Read the rest — Soy Won’t Prevent Prostate Cancer’s Return: Study

The study was published in the July 10 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, and was the first human study that tested soy supplementation’s effect on prostate cancer recurrence.

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People who are diagnosed with colon cancer after routine colonoscopies tend to have better outcomes and less advanced cancers than people diagnosed based on symptoms, says a new study. Those who were diagnosed with colon cancer as a result of symptoms were three times more likely to die during the study than the patients diagnosed after colonoscopy screenings, researchers found.

“It’s in line with its current use. It shows that colonoscopy appears to be beneficial in reducing deaths in those diagnosed with colorectal cancer,” said Dr. Chyke Doubeni, who studies colonoscopy use but wasn’t involved in the new research.

Colon cancer is the third most common cancer and the second leading cause of cancer death in the U.S., according to the government-backed U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), which recommends that people between ages 50 and 75 get screened by colonoscopy every ten years.

Read the rest — Colon cancer screening tied to better outcomes

The good news is that colonoscopy screenings need to be only done every ten years, as these cancers grow very slowly. The bad news is that if the cancer has spread beyond the colon, it is potentially much more difficult to treat.

The study points out that in addition to being more likely to die, 75% of patients that were diagnosed based on symptoms had advanced disease, versus 38% of patients that were diagnosed after colonoscopies. The study’s limitations are also mentioned, in that the data came from a hospital that has more cases of severe colon cancer than other hospitals, which possibly exaggerated the differences found between the two groups.

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The rates of mortality from melanoma are higher in males in their teenage and young adult years than in females of similar ages, according to a study published online today in JAMA Dermatology.

This difference in mortality between the sexes could mean that there is a fundamental biologic difference in male and female melanoma, the authors of an accompanying editorial suggest.

In a population-based cohort study that analyzed data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) network of cancer registries for melanomas diagnosed from January 1, 1989 to December 31, 2009, researchers found that young men were 55% more likely to die of melanoma than age-matched women.

Read the rest — Melanoma More Deadly in Young Males Than Females

Young men comprise only 40% of all melanoma cases, but more than 60% of all melanoma-related deaths. Awareness about melanoma and early diagnosis should be promoted in young men.

If you have dark or black moles on your body, particularly if they change in size, shape or color, you should see your doctor to be sure it is not one of the deadly tumors.

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Many individuals with alopecia areata (AA) have comorbid conditions, according to a retrospective cross-sectional study. The authors compared the prevalence of comorbid conditions in patients with AA with the prevalence of comorbid conditions in patients in the Psoriasis and Psoriatic Arthritis Follow-up Study. The association between AA and comorbid conditions was consistent with findings from previous studies.

Kathie P. Huang, MD, from the Clinical Research Program, Department of Dermatology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, and colleagues report their results in an article published online May 22 in JAMA Dermatology.

Read the rest — Alopecia Areata Associated With Autoimmune Comorbidity

Those with alopecia areata were found to have a high incidence of atopy, contact dermatitis, and acid reflux.

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Hundreds of thousands of pounds have been raised to send British patients to a doctor in America who claims he can “cure cancer”. But Dr Stanislaw Burzynski’s treatment has been dismissed by practitioners of mainstream medicine.

It looked like something out of Willy Wonka’s factory. A room full of pipes and noise; a production process that flowed through steel tubes, steaming boilers and glass tanks of bubbling liquid. But there was one striking difference from a chocolate factory – the whole room smelled of urine. This is an industrial facility in Texas which produces the drug at the heart of Dr Stanislaw Burzynski’s treatment. He thinks the cure to cancer can be found inside our bodies, substances in blood and urine that switch off cancer cells.

Dr Burzynski calls them antineoplastons. He used to extract them from human urine, but he now uses chemicals. Up to 300 litres of the drug, which has never been licensed, are produced in this factory every day.

Read the rest — Curing cancer or ‘selling hope’ to the vulnerable?

We look for heroes who break the rules imposed by traditional medicine, working with diseases impossible to cure. Hope is a strong drive and many times regular channels in medicine do not give the hope to those who feel abandoned.

I have seen reports on this doctor and although there is little evidence that what treatments he offers has value, he offers optimism for people with terminal diseases who do not otherwise have much to hope for.